The history since the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) and NOAA took over management of our fisheries has not been good. The harvest from the Atlantic fishery has dropped about 90% (LINK) and continues to decline. (LINK) The MSA requires that the fishery be sustainable, and at the first sign of a declining fishery, people should have realized a problem, instead, they just ignored the sustainability requirement and that is continuing to this day.
Models are used to create stock assessments and biological data are used in the models, but only as numbers. Getting to the basics, the scientific method consists of make an observation, collect data, analyze the data, make a prediction (hypothesis) and finally test the hypothesis. No matter how sophisticated the computer or how accurate the data, the prediction is always a hypothesis. This is not done in our fishery management. The prediction is taken as gospel and harvesting baselines are set for the next period of years. After that period of years, more data is collected, the model is run again, and if a decline in the population is seen, new baselines are set. This is called the shifting baselines syndrome, which was described in the 1990’s and is commonly an issue in fisheries management. This is a real problem as it legitimizes the decline. The baselines that the model sets are the target, which is the biomass at maximum sustainalble yield, and half of that is the threshold overfished baseline. If the population drops below the threshold, then they must be rebuilt to the target populaion. (LINK) With the shifting baseline syndrome, the target has been lowered and rebuilding efforts are insignificant because the populations are rebuilt to a historically lower baseline. NOAA claims that everything is “sustainably managed. This is very deceptive because only hypothetically is the fishery sustainably managed, Remember, model predictions are only hypothetical. Based on results, as are shown in the NEFSC State of the Ecosystem Reports (LINK), the fishery is not sustainable.
For more information, please see the information provided by AI (LINK)